Christopher Lynch

Artist Lecturer in Musicology

Bio

Music historian Christopher Lynch’s current research reevaluates the legacies of two significant musicians from Pittsburgh, minstrel composer Stephen Collins Foster (1826–64) and gospel songwriter and publisher Charles Henry Pace (1886–1963). To shed light on the processes of memory keeping that have shaped and distorted knowledge of these composers, Dr. Lynch is creating critical anthologies of remembrances of Foster and the complete musical works of Pace.

Dr. Lynch’s work on opera, song, and musical theater in the United States from the Civil War era through the post–World War II period has appeared or will soon appear in the Journal of the Society for American Music, Musical Quarterly, American Music, American Nineteenth-Century History and the books Music and World War II: Coping with Wartime in Europe and the United States (Indiana University Press, 2021), and In Search of the “Great American Opera”: Tendenzen des amerikanischen Musiktheaters (Waxmann Verlag, 2016).

Committed to developing pedagogical techniques and resources for addressing the current needs of students, Dr. Lynch co-edited with James A. Davis Listening Across Borders: Musicology in the Global Classroom (Routledge, 2021). His essay on teaching about minstrelsy will appear in Teaching and Learning Difficult Topics in Music (edited by Olivia R. Lucas and Laura Moore Pruett). He is also a co-author and project leader of Voices Across Time, a tool for helping K–12 educators integrate music into their curricula. In 2022 he helped create educational resources for the Broadway production of Paradise Square.

As a public historian, Dr. Lynch has written for Salon and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and curated exhibits for the Stephen Foster museum at the Center for American Music in the University of Pittsburgh Library System. He is also helping coordinate a “Gospel Music in Pittsburgh” concert for the American Musicological Society’s Many Musics of America event series.

Dr. Lynch currently serves on the American Musicological Society’s Council, which advises the Board of Directors, and the Committee on the Publication of American Music, which oversees the publication of volumes in the Music of the United States of America series of critical scores. He also serves on the Music Library Association’s Archives and Special Collections Committee and the Publications Committee of the Mozart Society of America.